Last week I caught up with Christian Gunning from Boingo. Having seen that Boingo will be the sole public WiFi provider at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Southampton airports in the UK, I was keen to understand Boingo’s plans for the UK.

Boingo provides access to approximately 132,000 WiFi hotspots across 171 networks in 103 countries. Boingo offers a range of tariff options in both US$ and £, including hour and day airport passes – but the tariff that caught my eye was Boingo Mobile’s £3.95 per month for unlimited smartphone access worldwide. You can’t use your laptop on this tariff but for iPhone, iPad or other handset access it’s looks great value. Also in the handset space, the US iPhone and iPad App Store has 1 hour access available for $1.99, for users that don’t want to commit to a monthly account. This is coming to the UK App Store shortly.

The UK airport coverage brings Boingo’s overall airport coverage to 58 airports across the US & UK. Since the iPhone launched, non laptop devices have gone from less than 1% to 50% of devices on the Boingo network, with the iPhone and the iPad being the top devices. Following the airport deal, the UK footprint is due for a big expansion later this year.

Jonathan is @sevendotzero on Twitter and is also at Sevendotzero

giffgaff is a recent arrival in the UK – a ‘virtual’ mobile network operator using O2’s network that rewards its customers for helping to run the service (we covered the launch back in November) – so we were keen to find out from the man behind it all how it’s all been going since then…

Inspired by The Times’ ‘two emails’ interview segment, we racked our brains for what people would really want to know from Gav Thompson, giffgaff’s founder (and head of brand strategy at O2 we should add) about its creation – then asked him.

Was there a specific turning point at which you thought giffgaff would be a great idea?

I was sitting in San Francisco in 2008 at a Web 2.0 conference, rather bored, and doodling in my book. At the conference, I had been impressed by the case study of President Obama’s campaign (that was still running at the time) managing to successfully activate communities via the web. Twitter was also on the agenda, but a few hours in, I was zoning out while hearing about endless big brands that were rather clumsily jumping on the bandwagon. The idea for giffgaff did literally fly into my head, and I wrote down ‘mutual, simple and fair’ as the three founding principles. My initial idea was to call the brand “2O”, as a reversal of “O2″, and to announce it’s origins in Web 2.0, but I was quickly persuaded that whilst my business idea was great, my name idea wasn’t!

My years in advertising (N.B. Gav was responsible for the legendary Guinness Surfer ad while at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO) taught me to keep things simple. The founding principle of giffgaff is one word; mutuality – and that is exactly what the ancient Scottish word giffgaff means, mutual giving.

A still from *that* Guiness Surfer advert

So is there a specific target market?

We don’t define our target audience in the classic demographic terms, as we think there are bits of the giffgaff idea that can appeal to different age groups or conventional segments. The desire for a simpler mobile brand relationship, the belief in the power of the community, and the willingness to get involved online and get rewarded for doing so, are aspects that appeal to many different types of people. Our youngest active member is 13, and the oldest is 77. Some of our members are on our forum helping other members out 6 hours a day, 7 days a week. Some engage less, but do their bit by telling their friends how good giffgaff is, and some just get cheaper mobile calls and texts but don’t really engage at all.

Was it an easy job to persuade O2 let you start GiffGaff? What are they getting out of it?

The O2 business development guys and I spent a fair amount of time developing the business case and doing lots of consumer research, and we finally presented the finished proposal to the O2 and Telefonica boards in early 2009. They said yes straight away.

O2 were forward-thinking enough to acknowledge that for a small, but important, minority of people, any big mobile brand – be it O2 or anyone else – isn’t really what people want. These customers want a different type of relationship with brands, in mobile and everywhere else. O2 and giffgaff are suitably different not to be treading on each other’s toes.

Is this really an attempt to create a new MVNO model, or just clever marketing spin?

In simple terms, all we have done with giffgaff is spot a trend and applied it to a mobile network. I don’t really think that’s clever marketing spin, I think it’s just a very open and transparent idea. We have a live Twitter feed on our home page that shares all views of us, good and bad, and all of our members’ views on us are available for all to see on our forum. As we have no contracts, people have the ultimate voting tool; their feet.

Why not simply integrate the concept for giffgaff into O2?

We did look into that, but decided it was wrong for O2 and what the brand is all about, and could compromise the success of giffgaff too. O2 is all about helping customers with the full suite of connectivity services, wrapped up in 24/7 customer service, aimed at the widest variety of customers with a huge range of needs and wants. giffgaff is much simpler than that, and is proud to acknowledge that the giffgaff model isn’t right for everyone.

Is there any backlash from within O2 about giffgaff’s anti-establishment approach?

giffgaff's latest ad campaign

Our anti-establishment approach reflects some very real feelings of some of the customers that we designed giffgaff for. But, at the same time, it is also intentionally tongue-in-cheek. Our colleagues at O2 totally understand what giffgaff is about and who we are targeting, and are confident enough in their own business to be comfortable about us having a little dig at the traditional mobile establishment.

giffgaff is run by CEO, Mike Fairman, as an independent business, in a separate office, in a different town, with a totally different team of people, many of whom have never worked for O2 or in mobile. Mike and his giffgaff team make their own decisions for what is right for giffgaff and the community, and some of those decisions aren’t the same ones that O2 would make for their customers, but there is certainly no backlash or bad feeling between the 2 companies. I think O2 see giffgaff as their cheeky little cousin.

What’s the uptake been like so far in terms of usage and what are the plans to grow?
Do you aim to have ‘x’ amount of users by the end of the year for instance?

It is challenging launching a new brand in the highly congested UK mobile market, and we have made things particularly difficult for ourselves by launching one with a low marketing investment model! However, our members are so involved (e.g one of our members ‘ragnorak’ recently earned over £750 from helping out other giffgaff members over the past few months), that we’re confident that our primary growth driver of happy customers passing on word of mouth recommendations about our little brand, will lead to a successful and sustainable business becoming a genuine alternative to the major mobile players for many years to come.

Hey! What’s that? It’s only James Freakin’ Whatley on my telebox!

James has been chatting to the BBC about roaming costs (which guest contributor Ilicco Elia also covered recently) and the smart ways you can avoid (or at least reduce) them… It’s going to be a hot topic as World Cup fans return home over the next few weeks to find some unpleasant surprises waiting for them in the shape of roaming bills.

In the interview ‘guru’ James recommends using a local SIM card as the best way to get affordable overseas calling and data, but he also name-checks Truphone and MaxRoam for their respective offerings. I’ve been testing Boingo recently for WiFi data and that’s been pretty useful too.

Take a look at James in action (from about 3mins 40secs in):

BBC Fast:Track Video [not mobile friendly]

What products, services or techniques do you use to keep call and data costs down overseas? Should the European price-controls be extended world-wide for European mobile subscribers?  Let us know in the comments…

Image and Video Credit: BBC Fast:Track

There was the predictable controlled chaos around the Apple Store on Regent Street. Queues snaked around the store, along the street and around the corner. At 6pm the line still contained many hundred of people – some estimates placing it at 1000.

Bizarrely though, with the huge rush to purchase the device, inside the store was relatively quiet with huge numbers of the new iPhones on display untouched. There was a sight to gladden many people’s hearts though – the display devices were running on the Three network (at last).

iPhone 4 available on all the major networks (including 3) now

Three have announced they’ll have stock in their own stores soon (but expect it to be at least a few weeks) but it looks like you can pick one up in an Apple Store now, assuming there’s any left.

The Really Mobile Project’s own Dan Lane was in the queue early on to collect some reserved devices. His initial delight at the free breakfast being handed around had long-faded by mid-morning when there were still hundreds ahead of him. He has, though been delighted with the device ever since describing build quality as “as good as those Vertu’s we once saw”.

Whilst hundreds of people queued, few had actually tried the new iPhone which sat ignored a few yards away...

Here’s a quick photo-tour:

iPhone 4 Launch Day: Flickr Set [mobile friendly]

Nokia have been at it again, only this time they blabbed to CNET Australia…

As we reported back in November, it does look like they will be dropping Symbian from N-Series

Told ya so....

Described in the comments to our original post as the ‘worse kept secret‘ this second slip makes it look increasingly like the leak we heard at the N900 launch wasn’t ‘just the Maemo marketing team getting carried away’ as it was painted in some circles.

We don’t like to gloat – it’s a very unattractive behaviour – but…

TOLD YOU SO

(sorry)

This story is bad news for Nokia, but not for the reasons most will think…

With MeeGo (Maemo’s oddly names successor) they’re loudly trying to differentiate ‘mobile computing’ from ’smartphones’. N-Series has always been the top-end ‘mobile computing’ range (even when Symbian was being used to do the job badly, such as in the N97) so it is entirely logical that it would move to the newer platform which is better suited to the task. The problem is that by allowing this news to drip out slowly Nokia aren’t getting the opportunity to explain that devices as powerful as the N8 will still be made (and will still run Symbian) and will just be moved to more appropriate places in the naming convention.

So what started out as a story looking like Nokia was reducing its commitment to Symbian causes a lot of ill-informed noise and in truth all that’s changing is the sticker at the top of the device.

Oh dear…

We laugh at the stories – the huge roaming bills for the unwary, the unwitting and occasionally the clueless, but is this fair? Is it actually possible for consumers to easily understand what data usage will cost them overseas?

I was looking at the data tariffs each of the operators are charging (especially around roaming data) and this caught my eye..

Below is a screenshot taken from http://vodafone.co.uk detailing the roaming charges customers pay to use phones for data abroad. The prices reflect Vodafone’s prices ‘now’ and what we will pay ‘from June 15th’. Let’s not worry about the fact that June 15th has been and gone and the page hasn’t been updated – that’s a minor point and I assume someone is working on it.

If you click on “On your Phone” you will see these new prices:

Europe: £1 for each MB up to 5MB, then £5 for every 5MB after that

Rest of the world: £3 for each MB up to 5MB, then £15 for every 5MB after that

Vodafone helpfully offer to “let you know via text message when you get close to 25Mb limit or, from June 1st, they say they will text when you “approach the end” of that. Unfortunately they won’t tell you as you’re about to exceed the limit of data billed per megabyte, so in Europe 5Mb costs £5, but 5.5Mb costs £10… Ouch. Handy way to side-step that European roaming data pricing cap though isn’t it…?

Now let’s look at  Vodafone’s “Business” tariffs. Business tariffs are also changing, but in this case the new prices come in on 1st July.

Roaming charges for the US differ from those listed for 'Rest of the World'

Take, for example, the “rest of the world” pricing. Until July 1st, business customers will be charged:

up to £12.75 per day for 25Mb

From then on, the charge will be:

£3 per Mb up to 5Mb

…so £15 for 5Mb. But if you look in a different part of the site, this same roaming charge will cost you £4.99 per Mb.

I’ve travelled a fair bit recently and always taken both my personal and my corporate Vodafone phones with me. The price structure seems complicated, the tariffs are confusing and the information on Vodafone’s website is simply wrong. And as for “pay monthly customers must use the WAP APN”, try explaining that to your loved ones!

I wonder how much I’ll be charged next time I’m away.

Ilicco Elia is Head of Consumer Mobile for a multi-national media organisation, although the views expressed here are his own. He is a prolific early adopter of consumer and mobile technology and travels frequently exercising this equipment to its fullest. He is a frequent attendee at mobile industry events and co-creator of CozyTweetup.

Post editing: Ben Smith (so any typos or errors are his fault)
Ilicco image credit: Benjamin Ellis

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose… It seems the UK government’s glacial pace in regulating the use of the airwaves isn’t just a recent phenomenon.

It’s also alarming to see the mobile phone belt holsters are over 30 years old too… I can hear Ewan from Mobile Industry Review grinding his teeth even from here.

Hat-tip: Terence Eden of Touchnote for the Twitter tip-off.
Credit: Footage from BBC Archives.
Nostalgia: My childhood, when Tomorrow’s World was the best thing on TV.

In the second of the series of collaborations with The Really Mobile Project, Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian speaks to Severi Uusitalo from Nokia’s Research Centre about the Image Space Mobile Browser concept.

Image Space has been in development for some time, although the mobile browsing element demonstrated at the Demola event is new.

Nokia explain it as:

…a prototype online community service. It lets you share your experiences, photos and other content about specific places as well as helping you understand their spatial relationships.

You can create content and access it seamlessly via the web or mobile device. The service is a fusion of sensors and computer vision. It creates an exciting mirror world where users can collaborate in many ways.

They have also made two other videos explaining the service:

Youtube Video: Nokia Image Space Concept [Mobile Friendly]

Youtube Video: Nokia Image Space (Experimental Beta at Nokia Beta Labs) [Mobile Friendly]

[UPDATE] Predictably Rafe has done a far better job of explaining Image Space on his All About Symbian write up. Rafe’s key points are:

• When taking a picture, orientation (compass and accelerometer) information is recorded, in the EXIF data, in addition to location (GPS). Captured photos can be stored locally or uploaded to a service like Flickr. Beta Labs has an daemon for Symbian phones that does add this capture ability for existing phones, but it could easily become a built in feature in the future.
• This extra information can be used to view photos in a new way – Image Space’. It is best thought of as an additional way of viewing photos that provides an alternative to existing viewing conventions (album and time-based views).
• Image Space view, which places the photos on a 3D landscape map/visualisation, and allows you to access photos by ‘flying’ through the landscape.
• Photos can either be stored locally or come from a remote source (e.g. Flickr). In the case of Flickr, the mobile client allows you to add and view comments associated with the image.
• This can be thought of as the next stage on from geotagging. It allows people to see the context in which a photo was taken. Particularly valuable is being able to see photos in the context of others’ photos that might have been taken in the place.

Read his full post at All About Symbian.

Occasional Really Mobile guest contributor Steve Kennedy has written an essential bit of reading for anyone who provides or shares WiFi connections in the UK.

There’s a great deal of myth and confusion about recent changes, but this post spells it out… There’s far more than the (little loved) Digital Economy Act to consider.

Read his post at The Next Web.

It can be the simplest things in life which give the most joy and recently as I’ve been using the new, free Ovi Maps to navigate my way around south-west London it’s been a car charger. For real.

The Nokia DC-9 Car Charger is an attractive, metal accessory that finally banishes ugly black plastic junk from your car. Finished in brushed metal and glowing gently blue as it does its job it looks right at home beside the dashboard lovingly created by Munich’s finest. It also charges phone batteries.

It would be rather nice if more accessories could be made as well and beautifully as this one…

Flickr image set: Nokia DC-9 Car Charger [mobile friendly]